That's not the reason for it. Rather, there's a very high premium put on having third-level education in Ireland as it was historically one of the ways to get out of poverty, even if that meant emigrating elsewhere. We could do with more people actually doing vocational courses on the German model, but owing to shifts in our economy, that's not as popular as it once was.
Also, education in Ireland isn't quite free. Sure, it's inexpensive compared to, say, the US, but the important thing is that access to third-level institutions is radically egalitarian, practically to a fault, owing to how entrance into third-level education works, based on a points score from your top six subjects in your final second-level exams.
Yeah, I'm developing a new product at the moment - I surveyed a bunch of end-users and a LOT of them had PayPal accounts -
so Braintree's PayPal integration is a compelling feature to me. That said, here in Europe, Stripe's fees are better than Braintree's, and PayPal's Eurozone fees are quite eye-watering.
That said, I'm Irish and therefore totally biased toward Stripe for that reason alone. As if their stellar tooling and the friendly, truly excellent customer and tech support I've experienced from them so far isn't enough :)
You'll be glad to hear that they've finally been removed since PHP 7.0 so slowly but surely they're being consigned to history.
And there seems to be much better awareness about the perils of mysql_* functions amongst PHP devs these days.
However, 5.6 is still in security support until 31st December 2018, so all that bad advice on SO and elsewhere is still relevant and lurking, waiting to be found by inexperienced devs.
Indeed. I heard some of the Somme Commemoration on the radio the other day, and I was moved deeply by Charles Dance's recital of Siegfried Sassoon's "Aftermath"[1]
> Do you ever stop and ask, 'Is it all going to happen again?'
It's impossible to imagine the horror - even pondering the numbers of fallen in the first day throttles the imagination, let alone the horrific ways in which these men were murdered in swathes.
All the more tragic that many of these young men left their homes to see the world and experience the adventure of war. They had no idea what was in store for them.
What a funny coincidence - I just discovered and used this a few hours ago. I wanted to rip some YT audio from (mostly) old records that I have that are not on Spotify etc.
I looked at some browser plugins but I wasn't really impressed. This, on the other hand, was a great discovery. Really configurable and well documented.
If your phone supports OGG and you're downloading from YouTube, you can download format 171 (-f 171) and change the container to OGG with ffmpeg. That way you won't lose any quality.
A top link on HN must send an enormous amount of traffic...has anyone ran a study as to how many hits it generates? I'm guessing a couple hundred thousand if it stays on the front page for a day.
Your estimate's an order of magnitude too high in my experience. More like 10-30,000 visits if you stay on the front page most of the day. Many submissions don't stay highly ranked that long either.
Anecdote warning, but this feels very common to me in "Hibernio-English" as well. I do it a lot when a simple yes/no would suffice, and I notice other people doing the same. I assume it's a construct that translated over from Irish. I must start listening out for native English speakers of different nationalities for comparison :)
"Very disappointing for a machine which isn't 3 years old". This really resonates with me, sitting at a similarly aged iMac that frequently displays bafflingly poor performance, displaying what I like to call the "psychedelic jelly-tot of death".
Sort of off-topic, but another thing that really frustrates me with Apple products is when something goes wrong with the hardware. I have a 3+ year old Macbook Air. The 't' key - specifically the little contact button under the key - stopped working consistently. Very frustrating when you start to realise just how much 't' shows up in the English language.
Anyway, I made some calls enquiring about how much a repair would cost: around €300. They just replace the entire aluminium top plate because it's impossible to replace a single contact button, and unfeasible to replace the whole keyboard array - this involves complete disassembly, and a bunch of other delicate steps, which look incredibly daunting.
I know that this is probably the trade-off for having such a small form factor, but between this, a defective SSD, a locked-in battery and periodically replacing chargers at €80 a pop, I am distinctly less enthusiastic about purchasing Apple products in the future.
The 2012 Macbook Air you are referring to does have a replaceable keyboard. I co-own a repair shop and we just did one. However, it is a daunting task. We charged $200 for the replacement ($30 for the part + $170 in labor) and it took our most experienced tech nearly 2 hours to complete.
The problem is (for anyone who's never opened a MBA) that if you look between each key on the keyboard, Apple decided for some crazy reason to put a teeny tiny screw there. So between the Q and W is a screw, and between the W and E is a screw...you get the picture.
This is a totally nutball design. It is a doable repair, but it takes forever, and be prepared for your hand/wrist to be quite sore after you're done.
If you can find someone or have a friend who does phone repairs, get them to do it and pay them for their time. I say phone repairs because the people who do phone repairs are used to dealing with teeny tiny Apple screws for a living.
That sort of design scares me. I've got a circa 2010 lenovo X201 and a keyboard replacement on that is a 5 minute job max and costs $20 and it's all a small philips driver (I use a swiss army knife). I'm on my third keyboard.
